Only if the Wind is Blowing
By Alan Caruba
I’ll bet you didn’t know that June 15th is Global Wind Day. Wind is part of the Earth’s atmosphere and, depending on whether it is blowing gently or strongly, there isn’t a darn thing anyone can do about it. Except for measuring its velocity and direction, wind like clouds remains largely a mystery to meteorologists.
Not so for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control, the people who brought you the global warming hoax, asserting that carbon dioxide, a gas on which all vegetation depends, was raising the global temperature—largely as the result of burning coal and oil as sources of energy.
Green on the Outside, Red on the Inside
By Brian LaSorsa
June 7, 2012
The United Nations has been stoking the flames of Earth worship since the early 1970s, when was all the rage. This year’s theme is “Green Economy: Does it include you?” My answer is a resounding “NO.” The greenies’ question is less of a pleasantry and more of a threat: If your business doesn’t conform to the green agenda, you’ll face a heavy fine. Despite the veneer of compassion, environmentalists are often power-hungry statist egalitarians. They are “watermelons” —green on the outside and red on the inside.
Was Jefferson really a profane secularist?
By Ellis Washington
Conservative historian David Barton, in his outstanding new book, “The Jefferson Lies: Exploring the Myths You’ve Always Known About Thomas Jefferson,” has once again presented an opus that shines the light of truth on the lies and propaganda of atheism, progressivism, liberalism, humanism and secular elites who possess a venal hatred for American exceptionalism. Barton asks, “Why can today’s Americans list so many negatives about Jefferson but so few positives? The answer is found in five 20th-century practices that now dominate the study of American history and its heroes:
"Deconstructionism, Poststructuralism, Modernism, Minimalism and Academic Collectivism.”
Barton’s major purpose for writing this book is “to reverse the effect of the five malpractices of modern history that have distorted not only the presentation of Jefferson in particular but of American history in general”…………Deconstructionists are not stupid. They know all too well these historical facts and thus hate the framers, ignore the Constitution and zealously seek to eradicate biblical truth with a fanatical passion because as Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, infamously said: The truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the enemy of the State.
Occam’s Butter Knife
By Steve Sailer
MIT’s Daron Acemoglu is a rock star among economists, one of the ten most cited in his profession. This is largely because of the paper the Istanbul-born Armenian co-wrote in 2001: The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development. Other economists have found that it provides a suave way to finally answer the embarrassing question of why, in the 21st century, some countries are rich and some are poor.
Acemoglu has a big new book out with James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, that makes his case at great length. To understand Acemoglu’s professional popularity, you have to grasp how awkward the major features of global economic reality are to careerist economists. If you look naively around the world, you might get the impression that, say, Chinese territories such as Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong have been economically dynamic because they have a lot of Chinese people in them. Moreover, the Overseas Chinese control much of business in Southeastern Asia, so we might assume that the Chinese tend to have a lot on the ball wherever they go.
“Acemoglu’s contribution was to come up with a regression analysis that, he claimed, showed that Third World poverty was the fault of those all-purpose bad guys, European imperialists.”Colonizing the Dark Continent
By Hannes Wessels
June 02, 2012
The left-of-center British monthly Prospect has also ventured out of comfortable territory with an intriguing article by Paul Romer on “charter cities.”….Both The Trouble With Africa and Paul Romer’s article appear to call for a form of neo-colonialism. A relentless flow of empirical evidence from Harare to Haiti and from Dakar to Detroit shows that “black”-dominated administrations follow a familiar path. They destroy established structures, leading to degradation, ruin, and chaos....In South Africa the Western Cape Province (which includes Cape Town) is one of precious few highly developed, heavily populated areas on the continent where there is a semblance of order, where services are provided and the rule of law is enforced. It is also the continent’s last white-led political entity of any significance. The Provincial Administration is led by the formidable Helen Zille of the Democratic Alliance, who is setting an embarrassing example of good governance for the ANC, which rules all the other eight provinces with varying degrees of incompetence and dishonesty... In a sense Africa is simply reverting to type. Prior to the colonial era most Africans lived in rural fiefdoms commanded by chiefs who ruled on a whim with absolute and savage power. There were no courts to speak of, no elections, few property rights, and little protection of the individual. Freedom was a foreign concept. European colonials in some cases halted and in others merely constrained this process, but they at least introduced variable degrees of order. This has dissipated.
The battle over GM: a noisy distraction
By Rob Lyons
Depending on who you were reading, it was either a showdown between rational, progressive scientists and wacky, ignorant Luddites, or it was a brave attempt by caring greens to stop an environmental catastrophe. In truth, the Battle of Rothamsted seems to have been a bit of a damp squib. The ‘battle’ came about because a campaign group, Take the Flour Back, announced that on Sunday it would protest against Rothamsted Research, a government-funded agricultural research facility north of London, and destroy an open-air trial of a new, genetically modified wheat that produces a pheromone that repels aphids. The pheromone is already present in 400 other plants. The aim of the new wheat is to reduce reliance on pesticides. But in the minds of anti-GM groups, mucking about with the fundamentals of life is far more dangerous than using pesticides. The group’s video has all the hallmarks of green activism: patronising, scientifically dubious and riddled with anti-corporate conspiracy-mongering.
Monuments to Spanish Insolvency
By Robert Latona
Spaniards alternate between rage and bewilderment as Europe lurches closer toward the currency implosion that will most likely vaporize Spain’s banking sector. Wasn’t it yesterday that the country boasted the EU’s second-highest growth rate? Plenty of monuments still stand from that “growth” spurt: Airports without planes, museums without artwork, and prisons without prisoners. Spain is now filled with empty new monuments to empty old ideas. A year after the ribbon ceremony, the airport at Castellon de la Plana remains boarded-up, unoccupied except for feral cats and yawning security guards, supposedly because the permits are held up in Madrid. Authorities have been unable to get a single airline or tour operator to commit to their airport.
News Flash: It’s Not Men Holding Women Back
By Patrice Lewis
In light of the dire and depressing news stories about a tanking world economy, I’m pleased to report a shining ray of sunshine: the Paycheck Fairness Act failed to pass the Senate on Tuesday, June 5. At last, something positive from our elected officials! Now, of course this means feminists are frothing at the mouth, but that’s OK. That’s what feminists do: froth like rabid dogs. Nothing new there. So what is the Paycheck Fairness Act? It is, allegedly, an “improvement” over the Equal Pay Act, which was signed into law in 1963. This (cough) new and improved act would have eliminated the caps on punitive and compensatory damages for alleged offenses that happened years, even decades, ago. Worse, it would make those damages available for even unintentional pay disparities. It doesn’t matter if the pay disparities were a result of cost-of-living adjustments for different parts of the country (New York City versus, say, Preston, Kan.). It would also make it easier for trial lawyers to file large class-action lawsuits, meaning lots of women could get together and whine collectively.
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